From the Editor

The Industrial Revolution:
A Teaching Challenge

Peter Stearns

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
15 (Fall 2000). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2000, Organization of American Historians

Some years back I learned of an Advanced Placement teacher, in a fine school district, who urged his charges in European history always to avoid essay questions on the industrial revolution. The reason, apparently, was his sense that the industrial revolution did not easily fit the standard skein of modern history, based as he saw it on regimes, revolutions, and wars. His analysis was correct to a point: industrialization is a drawn-out process rather than a series of discrete events; even the standard textbook ploy of listing key inventions and government policies does not capture the phenomenon. Yet his conclusion was dead wrong: the industrial revolution was such a huge change in the human condition that it cannot be bypassed. To the extent that it challenges conventional approaches to teaching, it is the teaching that must adjust, not the history (1).

The industrial revolution is a challenge in another respect as well: it's not really national. To be sure, it is possible to treat national cases of industrialization, (though within most nations the process displayed marked regional differentiation), but the causes of industrialization were never strictly national. The process almost always pushed economies into further international involvements, in search of resources and markets; only the Soviet Union provides a partial and temporary exception to this generalization. Figuring out, in a nation-based history course, how to build in the international component may compel another set of adjustments.

Yet for all its potential teaching difficulties, the industrial revolution is both intriguing and inescapable. I speak as a teacher and researcher who has focused on the industrial revolution all my professional life. The far-reaching, long-lasting impacts of industrialization continue to fascinate me. Few aspects of human life--and certainly not the basics, such as family, childhood, environment, and culture--escaped serious transformation over the course of the industrial revolution. Some facets, like leisure, were fundamentally changed twice: industrialization at first curtailed leisure, attacking traditional manifestations like festivals, and then expanded it again, but in dramatic new forms that promoted standardized spectatorship and the use of industrially-based products and transportation facilities.

Industrialization also continues to generate fundamental new historical findings, thanks to innovations such as world economy theory and the vantage points gained in an age of decolonization. No longer do we think that Britain plucked industrialization from the nimble wits of its artisans, the zeal of its middle class, and the brains of Adam Smith; we now understand that it had a lot of help from the profits (capital) and markets developed during the early modern centuries. Rather than simply creating a new international economy with western Europe initially on top, industrialization developed in conjunction with this new economy, and we increasingly know how this happened.

Renewed historical debates, another recent source of knowledge, also involve international industrialization as a prime framework. Discussions of the causes of the end of slavery and serfdom--seemingly ironic in an age that introduced many new compulsions for workers--have to factor in the economic and ideological impulses emanating from the industrial revolution.

Fascinating discoveries include the new understanding that a first age of modern consumerism preceded the industrial revolution and helped cause it, though industrialization would later propel consumer passions to further heights. Serious mass interest in stylish manufactured clothing, household wares, and other items constitutes a basic if unexpected facet of western European history in the eighteenth century. Ironically, figuring out how the new United States fit this trend is a task still incomplete. Concomitant work on the concept of proto-industrialization, though still disputed, adds to our understanding of the social and economic context from which the industrial revolution emerged.

Nevertheless, the basic fascination of the industrial revolution has long been clear; new vantage points merely spice the treat. A major shift in technology, particularly the adoption of motors powered by fossil fuels and the accompanying alteration in the organization of work generated sweeping changes in how people lived--including where they lived, their roles within the family, and how they evaluated the nature of work. The rise of the urban, manufacturing sector also redefined the social structure and powerfully affected the ways in which governments functioned.

Industrialization can be studied from all of history's topical perspectives. Debates about economic criteria--how fast output changed, for example, as well as the old discussion about standards of living--continue. The study of industrialization blends well with the history of technology, opening opportunities for creative teaching based on material objects and industrial archeology. Political and even intellectual interpretations of the industrial revolution provide insight. And in recent decades the big area of interest, reflected throughout this issue of the Magazine, involved social impacts. Industrialization's effects on gender roles, for example, have been fundamentally re-evaluated. Its impact on age structure inspired increased interest on the modern history of old age. The list of social impacts is extensive, and still growing.

However approached, the industrial revolution embraces some of the key components of historical analysis, and these can be directly connected to effective teaching as well as ongoing research. Issues of evidence, for example, are obvious: how can we best know how ordinary workers or "factory girls" experienced industrial life? The need to incorporate statistical materials and techniques, at appropriate levels, is an additional facet of the sources, and one that can be turned to good advantage in the classroom, along with literary evidence and voices from below. On another front, dealing with interpretation, debates continue over key aspects of the industrial revolution, including the term itself. These debates require attention to conflicting views about causation, process, and result.

Industrialization invites consideration of the causation of change. Indeed, despite the daunting magnitude of the phenomenon, it can be taught as a test case of how historians try to explain major shifts in direction. Individual actors do not currently figure strongly in causation explanations, but this approach is worth testing with regard to major inventors, business leaders, and (particularly in later industrializations) government reformers, such as Russia's Count Witte. It is also useful to distinguish prerequisites from causation; that is, an early industrializer required access to coal and iron, but the possession of these resources clearly did not prompt industrialization (they had been in the ground for a long time), but rather facilitated it. Impetus from the world economy; Europe's own preindustrial changes in manufacturing, consumerism, science, and popular culture; and the extra fillip provided by population growth demand exploration. But of course other factors may figure in, and merely sorting out priorities among the leading candidates involves serious assessment.

Causation also informs the question of why countries imitated Britain's initial industrial revolution in the order they did. Here, resources, prior economic and cultural structure, and opportunities for contact with industrial leaders play crucial roles. One of the ways to begin to fit United States industrialization into its appropriate international context is to align American causation with that of Germany or, a bit later, Russia or Japan.

Periodization is another key analytical tool usefully applied to the industrial revolution. The old quest for a clear formula for stages of industrial growth is no longer fashionable. But it is useful to seek criteria by which to decide that an industrial revolution is underway, to distinguish between initial phases and a full-blown industrialization process, and to determine that the revolutionary part of the process has ended. For instance, the idea that the United States was an industrial society by 1920 (the point at which, among other things, the nation was half urban for the first time) has some real utility in American history periodization more generally.

Comparison is a third basic analytical approach. Industrial revolutions all share certain features, and determining what these are, amid a welter of national or regional specifics, is a useful definitional exercise. But differences are intriguing as well. Why did the United States, the only society to gain democracy before it industrialized, lead the world in devising rigorous methods of factory regimentation, from industrial engineering to the assembly line? What are the various possible government roles in successful industrializations? Why, in some industrializations, are women's roles in the labor force reduced, while in others they hold stable? Why did early industrialization provoke revolution in Russia but usually not in the other societies that underwent the process? How has revised Confucianism, as well as the Western cultural tradition, provided a valid cultural context for industrial revolution?

Assessing industrialization's impact--that is, treating the industrial revolution as a cause of other historical developments--is perhaps the richest, most open-ended analytical assignment. How did industrial war or industrial art or industrial race relations differ from their preindustrial counterparts? Here is a vital means of connecting industrial history with the broader sweep of modern history in the United States and elsewhere.

The industrial revolution, finally, is an ongoing process, particularly when viewed through an international lens. The attempt to integrate industrialization with other aspects of history teaching sometimes confines the phenomenon to its first instantiation in the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, or a bit later for the United States. But the industrial revolution clearly has late-nineteenth- and even twentieth-century facets. First, issues raised by industrialization, such as changes in gender roles or labor regimentation, are not resolved even two centuries later. Second, key societies continue to experience the industrialization process. Japan, Russia, and the Pacific Rim are obvious cases in point, but the strong industrial surge of countries like Brazil, Mexico, China, and even India needs attention as well. It is vital to find ways to structure twentieth- as well as nineteenth-century history in terms of the industrial revolution process.

Teaching the industrial revolution can rest on a simple premise: here is one of only two fundamental transformations of human existence that the species has ever experienced (the other being the Neolithic revolution that brought agriculture). Capturing this insight in the flow of a modern history course and in the major forms of historical analysis remains a challenge, but one that can be met in various creative ways. The result is a tremendous step toward helping students see how the present has emerged from the past.

The articles in this volume deal with a number of key aspects of the industrial revolution, in relationship to teaching opportunities. The first essay discusses relevant scholarship, and provides recommendations for further reading, while the second article considers material evidence and how it can be applied in the classroom. The next considers the African American experience, important in itself and one of the ways to get beneath the surface of the industrial revolution process to its human dimensions. A fourth essay takes up the challenge of comparison and extension to the twentieth century, focusing on Japan and the Pacific Rim. Finally, the lesson plans return to the question of human dimensions, to evidence from technology, and to comparisons between Western and Japanese experience.

Endnotes

1. The following articles point to relevant materials. For starters, Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History, rev. ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). On proto-industrialization, Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Schlumbom, eds., Industrialization Before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Rondo Cameron and R. M. Hartwell discuss whether the industrial revolution is an appropriate term in Social Science History 14 (1990). For the newer economic analysis, see Joel Mokyr, ed., The Economics of the Industrial Revolution (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985). Finally, for a good introduction to consumerism, see Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, 1600-1760 (London: Routledge, 1988).

Peter N. Stearns is provost at George Mason University. He has written widely on topics associated with the industrial revolution, including a book on The Industrial Revolution in World History (1993). Active also in history teaching issues, he co-edited the recent book Knowing, Teaching and Learning History (2000).